


90 Minutes of Palimpsest Playtime: First Thoughts on "The Abominable Bride"

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: The Abominable Bride, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:35:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5735194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was my first response to TAB, before I started in on "Sherlock's Dreamwork." It discusses, among other things, that the episode is so structured that it is actually impossible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	90 Minutes of Palimpsest Playtime: First Thoughts on "The Abominable Bride"

Fortunately, for me, the premise neutralizes what is always my biggest peeve with this show, which is this obsession with punking the viewer at the expense of nearly everything else. “The Abominable Bride” is–compared to, say, “His Last Vow”–downright honest in its contract with the viewer. We know from the beginning that whatever it is we’re watching in the 1895 time period, it’s not ‘real’ in the sense that it’s not actually happening within the boundaries of the ordinary ‘real world’ of _Sherlock_. It can’t be. So no matter how many upsets and reboots and insane twists the narrative may spring on us, we can’t really get mad about it. I don’t mind playing along with you boys as long as you tell me we’re playing. It’s when you make me have actual feelings and then you laugh at me for being a sucker because you made me care, that’s when I get pissed off.

Although the reveal that the Victorian story is a drug-addled fantasy is delayed until minute 60, there is a fairly obvious tell much earlier than that when Mycroft calls Moriarty “the virus in the data.” Which is a nice little gift for people who like to feel that they’re being rewarded for paying attention; and which helped me, anyway, not get pissed off when Moriarty showed up in the sitting room and everything started going off the rails. Since it’s Introject Moriarty, he can be as bughouse crazy as he wants to be, and if that involves licking gun barrels well so be it. “Is it silly enough for you yet?” Well, that boat actually sailed a while ago, Jim boy; but I’m trying to be philosophical about it. 

You know, it’s a Christmas special; if you’re ever going to just do an episode that’s 90 minutes of Palimpsest Playtime, that’s the time. 

A palimpsest is what you get when you write something down, blot it out, and then write something else down on top of it. A palimpsest is what any contemporary film or dramatization of Sherlock Holmes is now–a page on which layer upon layer upon layer of earlier Sherlock Holmeses and John Watsons are inscribed. One of the things that keeps me interested in _Sherlock_ is the way, instead of just trying to obscure these other layers, Moffat and Gatiss take great delight in coming up with inventive ways to highlight, fold, spindle, and mutilate them. But while _Sherlock_  has always been handy the textual references and the clever allusions to the ACD canon stories, the show is absolutely defined by its _visual_ erasure of the Victorian period. The decision to throw out all the pipes and the tobacco and the pocketwatches and all the other lumber that was keeping Sherlock Holmes trapped under glass in Ye Olden Times was what made _Sherlock_ fresh, innovative, and exciting. To bring all that back destabilizes everything. I was pissed off at first about the gimmick of plunking down the Victorian Baker Street sitting room in the middle of the street–not a fan of all the similar BS they pulled with the bed in the middle of the field in “Scandal in Belgravia”–but then I started to like the way it emphasized its set-ness. Even with adaptations that actually do a *good* job of recreating the period, such as the Granada Holmes (as opposed to, say, Basil Rathbone’s era), you’re always aware of it as an artificial environment created by a set dresser, whereas with a contemporary setting that’s easier to forget. Putting the sitting room in the street reveals its boundaries and reminds us that when we look at one of these period interiors, we’re only ever looking at a little box full of illusion which is immediately falsified as soon as you can see what’s around it. Another nice moment, from that point of view, is when the props on the Victorian Baker Street set start shaking, and Sherlock can’t figure out why. It’s revealed to us later that this is the real world bleeding in–the plane has started its descent–but there are other explanations that are just as valid: it materializes the ways in which Sherlock is getting more and more rattled, and it also draws attention to how flimsy sets really are. 

As for what’s going on with the script, I appreciated the way in which we begin with something which looks very much like a standard period adaptation (the initial voiceovers are all drawn from the opening narration of _A Study in Scarlet),_ and then we get this cheeky little souped-up version of Holmes and Watson’s first meeting which *looks* like Doyle but definitely *sounds* like _Sherlock_. Then we get this wonderfully insane version of the show’s opening credits, in which all of the period stuff is shoehorned into a presentation which was clearly designed to create the show’s contemporary feel. All those different elements, so beloved, and yet when they’re put together it’s so hilariously wrong. And then, after the ‘real’ opening credits, we get a pastiche of the Granada Holmes opening credits (I love it that they got a version of the violin theme in there). It’s a preview in a way of what’s going to happen at the end, with the multiple versions of Sherlock ‘waking up,’ none of which are entirely convincing: this palimpsest has accumulated too many narratives and now there are too many beginnings and too many endings. 

So, you know, I enjoyed all that. I will say that, whether this was intentional or not, the Victorian stuff actually made me really grateful that Moffat and Gatiss decided not to go that route. The actors often seem muffled under all that garb and facial hair, and to me Freeman and Cumberbatch seem to be having some difficulty coming up with a Victorian version of their usual on-screen relationship. Maybe it’s an optical illusion, but everything just seems to me to be a little stiffer and a little more remote. So congratulations, if you boys wanted to make me appreciate the good things about this show just a little bit more, it worked. I bow to your formal genius.

Now as to content.

All of this po-mo meta stuff only reminds us ever more strongly that since neither Holmes nor Sherlock are ‘real,’ the minds actually creating this fantasy are Moffat and Gatiss. After all, the ‘real’ Sherlock can’t be pulling whole paragraphs of ACD’s dialogue out of his head for John’s voiceover–the ‘real’ Sherlock does not actually understand himself to be a modern version of a Victorian fictional character, and I presume that in the ‘real’ Sherlock universe Doyle and his stories will never be mentioned–nor could his mind palace possibly be stocked with this many ACD canon references. And there are so many. There’s Watson asking after ACD’s own “Christmas special,” “The Blue Carbuncle;” there’s the fact that the asshole who gets stabbed by his wife is named after the wifebeating alcoholic asshole Sir Eustance Brackenstall from “Abbey Grange;” there’s Sherlock’s conviction that they must have buried the real Bride and the fake Bride in a double coffin with a false bottom (”Lady Frances Carfax”); of course there’s the five orange pips, which is now an allusion to both “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Great Game;” Doyle’s obsession with secret societies and conspiracies ( soooo many stories); of course, “The Final Problem” and equally prominent, “The Greek Interpreter”;  Holmes totally failing to realize that Hooper is a woman in male drag (”Scandal in Bohemia”)…and on and on. The over-the-top Gothic wackness of the Abominable Bride case itself, especially its conclusion, may well be an allusion to Guy Ritchie’s _Sherlock Holmes_ , which also features secret societies and Gothic wackness and people faking their own deaths.

So the “drug overdose mind palace” conceit isn’t ‘real’ in that the Victorian fantasy can’t possibly all be coming out of Sherlock’s brain. So I’m just going to hold Moffat and Gatiss accountable for the following REALLY annoying things.

* Fat Mycroft. Yes, Mycroft’s corpulence is ACD canon. That still doesn’t mean they had to turn him into Mr. Creosote. Do I even have to explain why that bit just hit every damaging stereotype that exists about fat people and expected me to find it funny? Surely not. Moving on.

* The League of Women Voters.

I hate it. I hate every single bit of “The Abominable Bride’s” obnoxious ersatz ‘feminism.’ Holmes’s speech down in the church basement just made me want to hurl. ONCE AGAIN, the only way Moffat can think of to make women interesting or cool is to turn them into assassins. And how disappointingly par for the course it is that this whole part of the plot rests on the assumption that all women are interchangeable–that any woman can stand in for any other woman–that they all fit into that same wedding dress–that “this room is full of brides.” As for the “war” that Holmes magnanimously realizes “we must lose,” putting the struggle for gender equality in those terms simply reinforces the old-fashioned sexist-bastard view of gender politics as a zero-sum game in which every gain for women is a loss for men. Jesus, guys, we are not an invisible army meeting in church basements plotting how to get into your tree houses and steal your stuff. GROW. UP.

I take it back. There is one good thing about that  plot: Molly Hooper in drag, and Loo Breasley getting to be an aggressive pain in the ass for once.

But enough of that. Now to the real question: What, if anything, does this heady little romp tell us about what may be happening in Season 4?

Well, not much, because anything in it is liable to be falsified later. However, let’s speculate anyway because it’s fun:

* Obviously this episode is mulling over the question of Moriarty’s coming back. Sherlock tells us Moriarty has to be dead and I sure fucking hope he’s right. One could read this episode’s obsession with people who’ve blown out the backs of their heads and yet are mysteriously alive as a grim premonition of things to come; or one could read it as a way of telling us look, we realize that this is stupid, we’re really not going to inflict that on you, look how fucking ridiculous it is.

* It would appear that Sherlock’s junkiehood is going to become a major source of melodrama in Season 4. Well, I can’t say I’m totally happy about that prospect but let’s hope it doesn’t derail things too badly.

* But of course what we all really want to know is: how are the Johnlock prospects looking for season 4?

In this regard, “The Abominable Bride” is just a carnival of mixed messages. Victorian!Watson and Victorian!Mary, interestingly, have zero chemistry. Zero. They don’t seem even remotely interested in each other. Holmes cares more about Mary than Watson does. But of course, that’s Sherlock’s drug-addled projection of them, so that could mean anything. 

On the other hand, this episode did just about everything but actually put, in big letters across the top of the screen, SHERLOCK AND MORIARTY USED TO BE A THING. What else explains the way Introject Moriarty behaves, or the way any mention of him just totally unglues Victorian!Sherlock, or the way Introject Moriarty keeps yelling that he’s “your weakness?”

So this ups the gay quotient, which of course Moriarty does wherever he goes; but then the fact that, after his crack about how they should elope, Introject John’s response is not to elope but to kick the embodiment of Victorian!Sherlock’s repressed queer self over a cliff. Meanwhile, in the ‘real world,’ John and Mary go home leaving Sherlock to pursue his search for confirmation in the dirt. Johnlock early warning system goes down to defcon 0. 

BUT WAIT! That ending isn’t ‘real,’ and then we get spat back into the classic Victorian ending with the two of them in the sitting room, John in his accustomed chair. Where’s Mary? Who fucking cares? And we end with another allusion to Granada Holmes, which is famous for excluding Watson’s marriage from their Holmesverse in order to get the boys more quality coziness together. 

So basically we have, from a Johnlock point of view, nothing more than the Yanking of the Chains. We know no more about Mary Morstan coming out of this episode than we did when we went in. 

Form a speculation point of view I think it means nothing; but I did love watching Watson have Holmes’s back in the restaged Reichenbach Fall. Moftiss are taking advantage of the opportunity to rewrite both ACD canon and their own adaptation of it, replacing the bloody awful cruelty of both versions with a demonstration of their mutual love and loyalty. That’s nice. The boys will be OK, I hope. The girls, well, come to Mama Plaidder my sweeties, I will take care of you, and I will not forget that Sally Donovan was ever on the show.

  * 



End file.
